Page 5 of The Devil In Denim
“Ms. Jameson? Would you like me to hold the package for you?”
“No, bring it up.”
Then he wouldn’t have to call again to remind her. Anyway, maybe she’d gotten lucky and someone had sent her Alex Winters’s head on a platter. Though that would require something substantially bigger than a shoe box given the size of the man’s ego. She’d read his press after all. Hell, she’d even had to do a case study on the previous boy wonder and his business success during her master’s. Alex Winters was not a man who doubted his own worth.
Nor did he downplay his successes.
Of which, annoyingly, there were many. Enough to make him the sort of man rich enough to buy a baseball franchise. Impressive when he was only thirty-seven. The sort of success brought by lightning striking at the right place and the right time. In Alex Winters’s case that had been a series of inspired real estate deals when he was fresh out of college and then an equally inspired series of corporate acquisitions starting with a stake in a little software house that had subsequently been acquired by Apple for roughly eleven zillion times what he’d paid for it initially. Everything Alex Winters touched seemed to turn to gold.
Probably proof that he was indeed the devil.
Devil or not, with his business instincts, she should be happy that he’d decided to take an interest in the Saints.
But all she wanted to do was scream.
Dev’s quiet knock at her door interrupted her train of thought. His face was carefully bland as he handed her the package. Given she was wearing sweats, her oldest Saints training camp T-shirt that dated back to sometime in the nineties and was threatening to become more hole than fabric any day now, no makeup, and second-day bedhead hair, that was nice of him.
She carried the box back to the bench, dug out Advil and water to go with the coffee, and unwrapped it without enthusiasm.
When she pulled out the voodoo doll from the final layer of tissue paper she was too surprised to look for the card for a few seconds.
When she found it, she recognized the handwriting as that of her cousin Sean who worked for the Red Sox.
“Thought you might need this,” he’d written.
Which meant, she realized with a horrible sinking sensation, that the news was out.
People knew the Jamesons no longer owned the Saints. Knew she’d been booted like a rookie who couldn’t connect with the ball.
She did what any sensible woman would do when coming to such a conclusion. She yanked the phone cord out of the wall, switched off her iPhone, and went back to bed.
Several hours later Maggie woke up again. This time the remembrances flooded back faster, which was probably a sign that her goddamn hangover had retreated slightly. Damn. She squinched her eyes closed, hoping that she could will herself back to sleep. No such luck.
Her mind, in a move she thought highly unfair, started replaying the events of the previous day from the moment Alex Winters had walked into the conference room at Deacon Field and she’d been hit with a hefty dose of reality. The images continued relentlessly until she reached the point where she passed out in the taxi that Alex had carried her into.
She rolled on her back, arm flung over her eyes.
A mature person would get up, shower, form a plan, and go out and show Alex Winters that a Jameson didn’t take things lying down.
Apparently her maturity had been significantly diluted by last night’s alcohol.
All she wanted to do was stay exactly where she was.
What she needed was a pep talk. A motivational speech. The sort of inspiration her psychology professor had always advocated. She considered how exactly that might go.
“Well, Ms. Jameson, what seems to be the issue today?”
“I don’t want to get out of bed.”
“Why not?”
“Because.”
“That’s not really a reason, is it, Ms. Jameson? If you don’t get up, you won’t be able to achieve any sort of outcome today, will you?”
She pictured the notes being written.
Patient very unmotivated. Needs to find source of passion. Or large vat of coffee.
